Stacy Mitchell: We Can’t Shop Our Way to a Better Economy

Buying local isn’t enough. If we’re going to get our economy back on track, we have to re-center on communities.

posted Nov 29, 2012

"Over the space of just 20 years a handful of big companies have taken over large swaths of our economy. Our banking system, diversified as recently as the 1990s, is now controlled a handful of big banks.... One-third of everything we buy online now comes from a single company. Many people are beginning to question the wisdom of this and they're changing where they shop and what they buy and where they do their banking. What I want to suggest to you today is that a purely consumer-based approach to this problem, on its own, is not likely to get us where we need to go. It can't get us where we need to go, in part, because it doesn't fully recognize how we got here in the first place." —Stacy Mitchelll

Turns out most job creation comes from the 99 percent, not the one percent.

"Let Wall Street corporations and their phantom wealth machine slip into the abyss … Devote our public resources to building and strengthening Main Street businesses and financial institutions devoted to creating real wealth in service to their local communities."

How we can call out the myths, restructure the banking system, shut down the con game, and take back America.